Saturday, August 3, 2013

Do you ever forget to breathe? Maybe I'm the only crazy one, but that was my 2012-2013 school year. I completed my Master's Program this year! Yep that's right folks, I now get to put three little letters and a period after my name. Here goes...M.Ed! Hmm...Are those three little letters worth all the extra caffeine I drank, the bags that formed under my eyes, the hair I wanted to pull out, the episodes of The Bachelor that I missed, and all the extra pounds added to my bum bum?!?!

Absolutely! Crazy as it sounds, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat! It was really fun telling my students that I had homework and tests just like them. They really understood how much I valued education. My biggest Ah-Ha moment was taking on the role of student once again. I discovered how I loved to learn and I will most definitely transfer this knowledge to the students at my school. Okay enough Kumbaya! I warned you above that this was a whiner post! Moreover it's a please forgive me post. Last summer, I started this blog and fizzled out not long after. Why I did that in the middle of my Master's Program was just silliness! I recently saw this poster pinned on Pinterest.

Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! My first reaction is to punch that runner! Now that I'm calmed down, I'm replacing running with blogging because it's been weighing heavy on me for a long time!

Monday, November 26, 2012

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving break! I stayed in my jammies for almost 3 days straight! There's nothing better than that except that I had a difficult time getting into my pants today. Oh well, that pie from the PTA was so worth it! I had plenty of time to kick back and shop on TPT. You ladies are amazing! I am also super excited about all of the new clipart I got from kpmdoodles.com. Then I heard about some even better news! DJ Inkers is selling licenses to use her clipart on TPT! Yahoo! I got busy working right away on a new batch of goodies. I am an intervention teacher and I work with students in grades K-5. With such a big age range I struggle with what to give them for Christmas. Since they all love all of the different bookmarks I have available for them to use, I've decided to make them a collection of bookmarks of their very own. I'm talking tons of bookmarks for every holiday and so much more! I'm so excited! I'm going to call it Bookmark Bonanza of course! I think my students are going to love them! I should have them up by the end of the week! Stay tuned...because I'm going to post some freebie ones too! Today was busy busy, but I am so thankful for the life and family I get to call mine!

Sunday, September 9, 2012

How do you ladies do it? I really want to be a blogger, but where do you find the time? This is something I know I will always struggle with! I am loving my new position as Intervention Teacher at our K-5 school. One thing that we are focusing on this year is problem solving. In Texas we have a new beast of a test that is extremely rigorous! STAAR!! Well, to combat the beast we are turning to using some Singapore Math strategies because they have the best Math scores in the world! We are implementing Model Drawing as a method to solve word problems. According to their research the method can be used to tackle about 80% of math problems. You can find the steps a few different ways. These are the steps that we are using at our school. I made Math Mini Notebooks. One of our dad's sawed the notebooks in half for us. Next, we had the students glue their problem on the left. We solved the problem on the right. Please note...Live and Learn! Step #2 has the students rewrite the question as a complete sentence leaving space for the answer. About half way through the year, we discovered that it made their problem solving area a lot neater to write the sentence under the problem that they glued down on the left instead of on the right side. This gave them more room to draw their unit bars and work their computations on the right side. I hope the pictures help clear this up. Enjoy the steps freebie. I laminated these and made them two sided. The longer steps are more detailed. We made a shortened step version so the students could eventually memorize the steps and apply the steps when taking assessments. The empty box next to the step is to check off each step with a vis-a-vis marker or a counter.

A Chopped in half composition notebook

A Second Grader's Work

Click here to visit Slideshare and download your FREE Model Drawing Problem Solving Steps. In the middle of the presentation viewer click "save the file". Below is a preview of the document.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

As an Intervention teacher, motivation is key. I know that rewarding my students for the simplest accomplishments will go a long way. I have joined in on the owl craze!! I don't know why the popularity of owls blew up, but I love it!! I wanted to make good use of my cabinet doors because I don't have a lot of wall space in my classroom. So I made a "Hoot Hoot HOOray" board. On it I will write accomplishments for my students. I can't wait to fill it up and celebrate all of our small successes that will no doubt make a big difference in the hearts of my struggling students.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Yeah! I am officially a blogger! It's crazy because I have actually looked at this blog every day and have not posted a thing!! I guess I've been so concerned with what in the world to write about as my first post! I have to thank Christi of Design by Christi for understanding my vision so well and putting my blog together for me! She is amazing!! So enough with the excuses, it's time to dive in! I am so inspired by the many teaching blogs that I visit so often. I'm not the type that wants to be out of the loop so here we go! Thank you for making me want to be better. I think it's so awesome that my professional community has grown first outside of my own classroom, outside of my school, outside of my district, to so many teachers from across the country. How lucky our students are to have so many passionate educators out there that reach out for ideas and strategies to improve their teaching methods! If you have any tips for a baby blogger like myself, please let me know!!